Sweet Dreams for Sleeping Beauties: Pre-Teen Romances

Abstract

Sweet Dreams for Sleeping Beauties:Pre-Teen Romances Lois Kuznets (bio) and Eve Zarin (bio) Romance has always been a tremendous commercial success—a veritable publisher's gold mine since the eighteenth century. Bantam's Sweet Dreams Series—carefully graded "RL 5, age 11 and up," and available in supermarkets and drug stores as well as book chains and department stores, and by mail order through teen magazines—is only the latest in a long line of publishers' successes depending on "romance appeal" and is not even the first to penetrate the pre-teen market. In the opinion of many recent reviewers of these "teenage" romances, such works represent a step backwards in content and philosophy, as well as a step downwards in style: their world is lily white, socially homogenous, economically untroubled, and supportive of traditional, even reactionary, values and roles. These points seem to us self-evident. Still, these books are popular; this very popularity seems to us not just a passing phenomenon associated with the recent rise of the "Moral Majority" and its censorious reactions to "permissiveness" in art: as well as life. [End Page 28] This popularity, evident also in the appeal of Harlequin Romances to the mothers of these pre-teen readers, is the ageless, universal appeal of romance itself, even in watered down, anemic forms. When we talk of "romance" in this context, we are, of course, moving away from Northrop Frye's historically based genre differentiations, and acknowledging the modern and popular separation of adventure from love story. In the former, the male protagonist achieves his love object (if he wants one) as a result of a series of adventurous tests; in the latter, the female protagonist (who always wants love) is tested for her worthiness to be the object of a redeeming love. Romance in these terms is not so much a genre as a formula. When viewed as formulaic literature, even Bantam's Sweet Dreams series becomes interesting to us; recent theoretical works about popular formulaic literature, such as John Cawelti's Adventue, Mystery, and Romance, offer a framework for analysis and insights into the nature of the appeal of such works to the pre-teen reader, the eleven and twelve year old or junior high school consumers of these romances starring their big sisters, high schoolers of sixteen and seventeen years. In talking about formulaic literature in general, Cawelti, for instance, emphasizes the communal nature of the type, an aspect that seems particularly pertinent to the peer-group orientation of the pre-teen reader. He says that formulaic works are generally distinct from imaginative literature in that they can always be depended upon "successfully [to] articulate a pattern of fantasy that is at least acceptable to, if not preferred by, the cultural groups who enjoy them." In addition, according to Cawelti, "formulas enable the members of the group to share the same fantasies." (34) In projecting several hypotheses about the relationship between formulaic literature and the culture that produces and/or consumes it, Cawelti seems to give additional clues to the tremendous pre-teen appeal of such literature. Not only do such books permit communal or peer-group sharing of fantasies, but they encourage tentative exploration, in perfect safety, of topics of psychological importance, even urgency, to the readers. One of Cawelti's hypotheses seems thus particularly applicable to the prepubescent or pubescent female for whom encroaching sexuality is fraught with tantalizing dangers: "Formulas enable the audience to explore in fantasy the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden and to experience in a carefully controlled way the possibility of stepping across the boundary. . . . Formula stories permit the individual to indulge his curiosity about these actions without endangering the cultural patterns that reject them." (35-36) The heroines of teenage romances play with fire without consciously recognizing or naming it, and they do not get burned—unlike their sisters who have the misfortune to be the protagonists in "realistic" problem novels for this same age group. Bantam Books has been kind enough to send us review copies of six of their present line of twelve Sweet Dreams Romances (they're coming out at the rate of about one a month...